R&F Handmade Paints

One of the most frequently asked questions about encaustic painting is “What is the right surface to paint on?”  The mechanics of adhesion in oil and acrylic are well established but there is no equally standard body of knowledge about the adhesion of encaustic to various surfaces.

In 2008, when we worked with the chemists who helped us develop our Encaustic Gesso, it was necessary to test its performance. We needed to know how well the gesso adhered to a panel and how well encaustic paint would adhere to the gesso. This became all the more crucial when we partnered with Ampersand Art Supply to create a machine-made panel based on our Encaustic Gesso.  Encausticbord™ had to be both durable and seductively inviting to work on.  It was also important that it would be suitable for multi-media use since encaustic is so often used in conjunction with other mediums and materials.

Once it was clear that the Encausticbord™ worked well with oil, water, and wax based mediums, we applied a series of systematic tests for durability that we had used when we released our brushable Encaustic Gesso.

The first and simplest test, of course, is to freeze a painted panel and then slam it to see if the paint will break off.  We have been using “The Freezer Test” since the early nineties when we needed a simple way to help artists determine compatibility of their substrate with encaustic.  This mainly tells you how well the painting should hold up under acute impact when shipped in cold weather.

The longevity of a painting however, depends on many variables, the most important of which are the gradual fluctuations in temperature and humidity that take place over long periods of time in normal conditions for exhibiting or storing artwork.

To simulate this, we have developed a procedure of cycling painted panels through freezing and thawing periods to exaggerate those fluctuations in temperature. We follow this with quantifiable stress tests designed to detach any areas of paint that became vulnerable from the repeated contraction and expansion of the freezer test.

We repeat these tests using a range of colors, because, as most of you who work in encaustic know, every pigment has a characteristic effect on the wax (as it does on other mediums). Umbers, for example make the wax very hard and brittle. Cadmiums make it soft. Titanium white can make it gummy.  Each family of colors has to pass the test for a ground to be considered suitable for encaustic.

How dependable are these tests? It’s fairly easy to say if you’re talking about a couple of decades. Most of us have experienced how materials behave in that amount of time.  We know from the Fayum portraits that beeswax will last 2 millennia and longer. Yet our modern pigments differ from the ancient ones.  The supports and grounds we work on are also different. This is why it is important to continue developing tests to simulate fluctuations in the environment over time.  It is important to test the effects of temperature, humidity, light, vibrations, pollution, and phases of aging in the medium that over time can break down the structure of the paint and cause the separation of one material from another.

The methods used in these tests do not result in predictions, only educated guesses. What they can do is separate materials with short-term durability from those that promise to survive much longer.

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One last word about shipping in cold weather:  Most artwork is fragile in extreme cold, even work that is made with materials that easily withstand normal temperature fluctuation. The best precaution in any instance is careful packaging and, when feasible, expedited shipping time.

Last Saturday, January 15th, was the 23rd anniversary of R&F’s founding in the now proverbial basement in Brooklyn. But what’s so special about a 23rd anniversary? It’s not a marker like a 20th or a 25th anniversary. I have to admit even we didn’t pay much attention to it here.

But then I got to thinking how much this year really does represent something very special in R&F’s history. This was the year that we collaborated with Ampersand Art Supply to create Encausticbord^TM, and that led to the introduction of the Encaustic Center, a fully integrated selection of encaustic paints, tools, and supports now available in art supply stores around the country.

Our 1st anniversary represented our continuation of commercial encaustic paint begun by Torch Art Supply in the late 1940s, which was for many years the only commercial encaustic paint in the world. But it was, particularly back then, a specialty paint relegated to the back corners of most art stores.

Original Torch Art Supply encaustics

R&F’s original hand cut encaustic cakes

Our 23rd anniversary represents the establishment of encaustic paint as a mainstream art material. While the symbol of a 20th anniversary is china and the symbol of a 25th is silver for R&F the Encaustic Center signifies this milestone in our history.

R&F's encaustic paint is available in three sizes (40 ml., 101 ml. and 333 ml.)

The Encaustic Paint Center

One of the speakers at last year’s Montserrat Encaustic conference was Kate Smith, a conservator who had cleaned the encaustic murals in Boston’s Trinity Church.  I stayed a few days after this year’s conference to visit the church and see the murals first hand with Francisco Benitez who shares with me an interest in the history of encaustic.

The murals were painted by John LaFarge, an American painter and decorator, in 1876-77. LaFarge was the personal choice of Henry Hobson Richardson, the church’s architect, to do the murals in spite of the fact that he had never painted on a large scale before. But La Farge had by that time a long association with encaustic having been introduced to it 20 years earlier in Brussels by Henry Le Strange. Le Strange had used encaustic in 1855 to decorate the west tower ceiling of Ely Cathedral in England. La Farge began to use encaustic in 1863, initially for easel paintings, and it became his preferred medium for the rest of his career.

Work on the Trinity Church murals was begun in late 1876 and continued through the bitter winter weather in the unheated and unfinished church, often competing with masons and other workers for use of the scaffolding.

The type of encaustic that La Farge used and his reason for using it were different from how encaustic is generally thought of today. In his previous work, he combined wax and oil. Bu the common practice for encaustic mural work was to use colored sticks of beeswax and resin (usually copal, a very hard resin, or elemi, a soft sticky resin) that were melted into a heated solvent, either turpentine or oil of spike lavender. Venice turpentine was sometimes also added. The paint was applied warm or cold.

This gave La Farge a medium that could be applied relatively quickly over dry plaster, as opposed to the painfully slow process of buon fresco in wet plaster. It also gave him a bright but matte surface that resembled the traditional fresco. For that reason, he did not fuse his encaustic.

The question that is often asked today is whether this is really encaustic or a form of cold wax painting, similar to that used by Brice Marden. There is no easy answer. Encaustic has historically been defined by its principal material (wax) or by its technique (fusing). The term encaustic, coming from the Greek, “to burn in,” does refer to the technique. But needn’t be the deciding factor, and we are certainly not intending to make any judgment here.
La Farge intended his work to be considered encaustic, and as with encaustic, the work that I saw at Trinity Church is as vibrant and beautiful as it must have been 130 years ago.

Kingston, NY, is right in the center of the largest artist community outside New York City. This makes for a lot of artist activity.

The procession heads downhill past Kingston's 19th century canal-era buildings

One of the most delightful and hilarious is the annual Artist Soapbox Derby, which just had its 16th run down the steep hill of lower Broadway last Sunday.  Brakes are more important than speed in this event, which is more of a parade of artistic ingenuity than a race of aerodynamic engineering.

Some aim high...

...others aim low

...and others with thoughts of future races

Sponsored by Donskoj Gallery and the City of Kingston, the Derby attracted 28 entries and a hardy crowd that refused to let the recurring rain storms dampen its spirit. To see more photos go to the Kingston Artists’ Soapbox facebook page.

Here's the Derby winner (was it perhaps inspired by Louise Bourgeois' overwhelming bronze spiders?)

Spider's Head

There are a number of things about the Annual Conferences of Encaustic Painting at Montserrat College of Art that amaze me, and a good deal of the credit goes to its founder and director, the indomitable Joanne Mattera, who began building a network of painters back in 1999 with her book, The Art of Encaustic Painting. 
Joanne has kept the conference program broad enough to appeal to a wide range of interests, allowing the event to build upon itself each year.  This momentum is a reflection of the social nature of the current encaustic movement. So much of the development of contemporary encaustic has been community-driven – artists teaching themselves and each other. From this have sprung networks, conferences, retreats, exhibits, and collaborations.

Another thing that amazes me about the conferences is how much I myself learn. Here I am, involved in all areas of encaustic matters 364 days of the year (I take off Groundhog’s Day), and I still come across information about materials and methods that I did not know or was only vaguely familiar with.  For example, Roberta Bernstein’s excellent keynote talk on the work of Jasper Johns was both refreshing and enlightening. Johns’ great feat was to usher the medium into the modernist era.  He did this by concentrating on surface effects that had as much to do with his thematic concerns as the images themselves. Except for the use of Japanese kimono irons, his encaustic tools were simple everyday implements. Yet with these, as Dr. Bernstein showed with examples from major points in his career, he explored much of what is now standard encaustic vocabulary – collage, layering, and muted color surfaces.

Several of the sessions that I attended dealt with either materials or with social aspects of encaustic: Ask Dr. Wax, Inquiry into Soy Wax, Batik and Encaustic, and Creating an [encaustic] Organization.

John Dilsizian, dubbed Dr. Wax at the conference, has long been the technical mentor on wax. Here are some of the things he discussed:
·    Microcrystalline and paraffin waxes as substitutes for beeswax. Both microcrystallines and paraffins are derived from petroleum, and one of the problems of working with either is their tendency to turn yellow, due to residual oil in the refined wax.  Although blends of micros and paraffins can imitate some of the characteristics of beeswax, the long-term structural integrity is not known.  Blends of microcrystallines/paraffins/beeswax are linear. This means that if you combine waxes with the following approximate melting temperatures: 2 parts of a micro (170°F) with 1 part of a paraffin (140°F) and 4 parts of beeswax (145°F), you will get a wax with an average melting temperature of 151°F.  Blends of carnauba or resin with beeswax, however, are not linear but geometrical and their combined melting point has to be measured because it is not easily calculated.
·    Resin and beeswax. Some of the virtues of adding damar resin to the wax is that it retains heat and remains flexible for a longer time. It also adds to the adhesiveness of the wax. Its hardening effects on the wax are progressive over time and not entirely immediate.
·    Bleaching and blooming of beeswax. The best way to decolorize beeswax for artists’ use is by running the wax through filters. Using chemical bleaches can reverse over time; the wax retains some of the bleach, and is more likely to react with pigments.  However, not all crude waxes can be decolorized by filtering. Surprisingly, the greater the tendency of a beeswax to bloom, the easier it is to be decolorized by filtration.
·    Colony Collapse Disorder among bees is still of grave concern. There has been a larger count of bee deaths this last year than previously. Autopsies have shown a higher incidence of pesticides and virus. This is surprising and disturbing because each cause should be countering the other – if higher pesticide deaths, there should be lower virus deaths and visa versa. But this is not turning out to be the case. The mystery continues with potentially major consequences for our general food supply, honey production, and wax supply.

Barbara Walton has been conducting experiments with soy wax as an alternative to beeswax for encaustic with her colleague Dr. Toni Wang, a food scientist, at Iowa State University. The initial results of soy wax and damar resin proved too soft and dull, cracking occurred, and there was a lack of adhesion between layers. Later formulations were more successful. Still, this was an in-progress report of experiments that are continuing.

Regardless of whether or not they result in a useable soy wax-based encaustic, the mere effort to research this avenue is one more sign that encaustic is an open field with many possibilities still to be explored and discovered by the inquisitive.

Cat Crotchett’s talk on a collaboration she did with batik artisans in Indonesia gave another demonstration of the expanding encaustic community. The project began with a visit of batik artists to Western Michigan University who were fascinated to discover an artistic use of wax in which the wax remained as part of the image, rather than being used as a resist to produce a negative image. Grant money from arts and cultural organizations and a donation of paint from R&F funded a trip last summer to Yogyakarta, the major arts city in Java.

Many technical hurdles were overcome, such as the improvised use of the pans normally employed to heat the tjaps (copper pattern blocks). Available tools such as the traditional tjanting tools, torches, palette knives, and brushes were used. Fusing was often done simply by leaving the work in the sun.

Two sets of workshops were set up, one with batik artists, the other with fine arts painters, and their approaches were greatly different. One very interesting cultural difference emerged from the workshops. Painters here in the West tend to work individually, sharing palettes and their work space only when necessary. But the Indonesian artists worked communally, sharing palettes and work space out of custom.

Harriette Tsosie and Kim Bernard talked about the setting up their respective encaustic networks, The Encaustic Art Institute (formerly New Mexico Wax) and New England Wax. Each organization has between 60-70 members. New Mexico Wax merged earlier this year with the Encaustic Art Institute located in a spacious 2,400 sq. ft. building built by its founder, Douglas Mehrens, with the intention of being a national center for encaustic art. New England Wax was formed in 2006 and focuses on group participation through bi-monthly meetings, exhibits, and museum and gallery visits.

Listening to Kim and Harriette made me think once again about an anomaly in our encaustic world. It is striking how so many artists are drawn to encaustic, seek out other encaustic painters, form encaustic organizations, publish encaustic manuals and videos, set up encaustic exhibits, and attend encaustic events yet emphatically state that they are not encaustic painters but artists who happen to use encaustic.

In a sense, that’s what the encaustic networks are  about – a counter to the solo artist making her or his way in the gallery world in which encaustic becomes a vehicle for creative communal activities.  The EAI held an exhibit called “Dialectic” that partnered artists using encaustic with artists using other mediums. NEW collaborated with the International Encaustic Artists in the “Diptych Project,” in which an NEW member sent a finished piece along with a blank panel to the IEA member to complete as the second half of a diptych. In these activities is a sense of community, certainly grasped by the Indonesian artists whom Cat Crotchett encountered.

One of the great things about our visiting artist workshop program is the opportunity to acquaint other artists with unique approaches to encaustic painting.

Francisco Benitez, from Santa Fe, taught a class on encaustic portraiture June 2nd thru 4th here at R&F.  Switching from oils to encaustics a number of years ago prompted him to pursue his long time fascination with the encaustic Fayum funeral portraits of ancient Egypt and explore the techniques that produced them.

Using metal tools and heated tips that he had designed to duplicate the ancient bronze spatulas used by the Fayum painters, Francisco demonstrated how direct manipulation of the encaustic can create very controlled and at the same time rich impressionistic effects. This is largely due to the sensitive flexibility that give the tools the feel of being an extension of the fingers. These tools, by the way, are being manufactured for R&F by Sculpture House, and will be available in August.

Another feature of Francisco’s technique is the recreation of the four-color palette. Developed around the 5th century BC, the four color system, known as tetrachromy, utilizes black, white, red ochre, and yellow ochre (equivalent to mars red and yellow). When skillfully mixed, they can create a full color range that is both harmonious and elegant in its economy of color.  Following the Greek tradition of portraiture, the painting is begun on a dark ground and the layers of color progress from dark to light in a process that is like bringing the face from out of the shadows.

Compare Benitez’ method in one of his demonstration pieces below with a Fayum portrait from the 1st Century AD.

Portrait created during workshop by Francisco Benitez

Fayum Portrait, circa 100 AD

In conjunction with Francisco’s workshop he also has a solo exhibition at R&F entitled Ancient Voices through Modern Eyes: Encaustic Figurative Paintings by Francisco Benitez on view through July 24th, 2010.

There are so many questions that keep popping up about the materials that we use, where they come from, and how they are processed.  When we talk about beeswax,  terms such as Pharmaceutical grade, bleaching, refined and filtered are commonly used.  This blog seeks to offer up the materials definitions that are most important to you.

Worker honeybee with wax scales from Beeswax: Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products by William Coggshall & Roger Morse, published by Wicwas Press, 1984.

Beeswax is secreted by wax glands in the bee’s abdominal area and used to create the honeycombs of the hive. Pure beeswax is composed solely of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Its natural color when it is secreted is white. When beeswax is harvested from the hive it is often contaminated with impurities, which discolor it. At this stage it is called unrefined or crude beeswax.

Crude Beeswax from Ethiopia

Unrefined or crude beeswax is colored in a range of earthy hues from yellow to black. This coloration is caused by pollen, propolis (resin), and dirt. If you use unrefined wax for its color, it is important not to assume that the color is permanent because the color  is organic matter, which is not necessarily stable in light and is subject to fading, darkening, or a color shift. (See below for variations of crude beeswax)

Crude Beeswax Domestic

Crude Beeswax from New Zealand

These are reasons why you would most likely want to use decolorized, white beeswax for encaustic. You may wonder how does the wax get whitened? Artist manufacturers avoid the term ”bleached beeswax” because it implies the use of chemical bleaches. But the wax industry uses the term for the mechanical as well as the chemical methods of decolorizing beeswax.

Chemical bleaching is not the best choice for artists for two reasons. For one, chemical bleaching (which uses either potassium permangenate & phosphoric acid or sulfuric acid or various peroxides) does not always mean removing the colorant. In many cases it simply masks it. It is often used to whiten colorants that non-chemical bleaching can’t, but these colorants can later return to their original color. Furthermore, chemical bleaching can be harsh on the wax, creating free fatty acids and making the wax more reactive to pigments and pollutants.

Sun bleached beeswax plant from The Chemistry and Technology of Waxes by Albin H. Warth, published by Reinhold Publishing Company, 1956.

Sun bleaching exposes the wax to the ultraviolet light of the sun, which breaks down the colorants. This is a gentle and effective method of decolorizing the wax. The process, however, is expensive on an industrial scale because it requires so much space, but it is also the most accessible method for artists who want to bleach their own wax on a small scale.

Filtration is a process in which the wax is forced under high pressure through filters of activated carbon and clay that absorb the colorants and take out all foreign matter. Filtration is preferable to chemical bleaching because it maintains the structural integrity of the wax. It is also, in the long run, the least expensive and the most practical of the three methods. It is the best choice for artist material.

Example of a Filter

Pharmaceutical grade beeswax is a standard set by the government that certifies that the wax meets certain chemical requirements and that it is pure beeswax. The chemical standards (such as its ability to be saponified) are of importance to the cosmetic and pharmaceutical use of beeswax. For the artist, the real importance of pharmaceutical grade beeswax is that it is a guarantee that the beeswax has not been adulterated with other waxes (such as paraffin or microcrystalline), rosins, stearic acid, or tallow. However, the term pharmaceutical grade does not refer to the method by which it has been decolorized. Artists should seek out wax that is both guaranteed 100% beeswax and filtered or sun bleached.

And, in case you’re wondering, R&F uses only pharmaceutical grade filtered beeswax.

This blog is an amplification of comments that I originally posted on www.AMIEN.org.

Kingston HS class

Kingston High School, just a couple of blocks away from R&F, has a vibrant art department, due in large part to its inspired and dedicated teachers. They bring their students here for encaustic workshops, and the students are welcome to come back and work on their own in the workshop room.

Students in workshop room at R&F

Several years ago art teacher Lara Giordano partnered with chemistry teacher Christine Marmo to help make chemistry relevant to art students. Shuttling between science lab and studio room, the students learn the chemistry behind paper, pigments, dyes, paints, binders, metals, and clays, which gives them a deep material understanding of printmaking, papermaking, painting, photography, ceramics, jewelry making, art conservation, and chemical hazards in art. This understanding gives them life-long tools to master the various mediums.

Christine Marmo and Lara Giordano

The students gain a full understanding of color as they study electromagnetic radiation, prisms, and the refraction of white light into the different wavelengths of colors. In order to learn about papermaking, for example, they study the intermolecular forces of hydrogen bonding between cellulose and water. Soil chemistry relates to ceramics, acid-base and oxidation-reduction reactions relates to photography, and the study of the body – the vulnerability of the respiratory, circulatory, and nervous systems, as well as of skin and eyes – relates to understanding the chemical hazards of art materials.

I often wonder what such a class would have meant to me 45 years ago when I was a disaffected high school student flunking chemistry (and not much better in other subjects) but reading Max Doerner’s The Materials of the Artist to learn how to make egg tempera and explore the properties of oil paint. It would have made chemistry relevant to my obsession with art. It would have all made sense to me, and I would not have had to wait until I was making paint to finally appreciate the underlying science of making pictures.

When Lara and Christine asked me to give my talk on the chemistry and history of painting materials to their class, I was thrilled and intrigued by the challenge of simplifying this information for young artists. I’ve given this talk to professional artists and college students, but these kids don’t take second place in sophistication, and now and then I get questions that makes me pause.

The class was at 8:00 in the morning! (Who, after all, wants to learn chemistry at a reasonable hour?) The first day we explored what is color (how color is not a thing by itself but a chemical that reacts to light), the chemistry of pigments and dyes (what’s the difference?), the components of pigments (how, for example, cobalt blue is made from black cobalt oxide and silvery aluminum), and the history of pigments from ancient times to modern. All of this gets jammed into the 40-minute class period, so it’s just a sketch. But, still, we cover a lot of ground.

sample-jars

The second day we discussed different mediums and their relationship to pigments – how refraction and surface characteristics of the paint film affect the hue of a pigment. A pigment has a variety of hues and opacities depending on what medium it is in. Pigment in aqueous mediums (distemper, watercolor, egg tempera) is more opaque and lighter and brighter than pigment in oil or wax, which tends to be deeper and more translucent.

Richard showing blue

Cobalt blue pigment in different mediums

It’s a real challenge, but I love it every time I do it.

Ultramarine Blue Pigment

Ultramarine Blue has a fabled history. It is naturally derived from the semiprecious gemstone lapis lazuli. It gets its name from the Latin, meaning beyond the sea, since the best source of lapis was in the northeastern corner what is now Afghanistan. (more…)

Cynthia Knott, Naiad, oil, encaustic, and metallic on linen, 40"x74", 2005

We are always thrilled when one of our customers gets well-deserved recognition. The latest instance was Cynthia Knott from eastern Long Island who recently received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in October. (more…)